> Taken literally that statement is true. You can certainly write a script to use a word processing > software and a calculator application to levitate your house (this goal is one instance of the set > "any imaginable purpose"), for instance. Most likely, that won't work.
If you had hardware controlled by the computer that was capable of levitating your house, then there's no reason it wouldn't work perfectly.
> But if we bring the scope down to "for solving emergent problems that the applications cannot > solve in isolation", then how is this any different than writing a script to control gimp and > oowriter on Linux?
> Unique... hmm, by your capsule description, it sounds just like Applescript
Yes, these are very both similar to how AREXX worked. In the case of AREXX, the applications actively extended the language with new functions.
I had an Amiga 1200 when I was in college, the early 90s. One of the sweet things that the Amiga OS had was AREXX. It was a simple scripting language, but it was able to listen to and talk to applications that had an AREXX port. So you could write scripts that allowed entirely different applications to communicate with each other for any imaginable purpose. That was fun and--even by today's standards--unique.
> While Clinton did obviously commit perjury, I personally am happy he wasn't impeached for it since
> it didn't really harm the country in any way.
Dude, he was totally impeached for it.
I've still got a Tandy PC-1 pocket computer from the early 1980s. It was built by Sharp and re-badged for Radio Shack. It's got an extremely slow processor and less than 1.5 kilobytes of RAM for BASIC programs.
It was made in Japan and you can tell that it was built to last for decades. The chassis is sturdy metal with almost no flex to it and the keys are of very high quality. By today's technological standards the thing's a joke. But I bet it outlives my HP Pocket PC.
> Thats the biggest problem with our society, no one values experience, no one values wisdom > gleaned from 25 years of doing the JOB. . . We don't do cutting edge, we do what works
I'm a "relatively older" programmer, too, and I think that statement is objectively false. Employers value experience and results above education, and I think that's why I'm gainfully employed as a PHP programmer despite the fact that I've spent only two of my 20 years of programming writing PHP.
But you can't--can't--can't--go into an interview and say, "I was writing COBOL before you could write your name, whipper snapper. Why, backinmyday...".
You don't have to dress like a 26-year-old. You don't have to dye your hair. You don't have to pretend to be anything you're not. But keep up with your industry. Learn Ruby, learn AJAX, contantly be a neophyte in something. The constant change has ALWAYS been what makes IT a great industry to be in. If you don't do "cutting edge," it means you've given up, and THAT'S why there's no interest.
> And a definition like 'cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit' > which has nothing to do with the properties of the planet itself, and > is obviously a post hoc definition contrived to eliminate Pluto, is how > science should work?
The ability of a body to have cleared its orbit has all KINDS of things to do with the properties of the body itself. How massive is it? What's its diameter? How long has it been orbiting the sun?
I agree with you when you say that the definition is designed to exclude Pluto and others. But I don't see any malice; they're answering the question, "Why isn't Pluto a planet?" rather than the question, "What can we do to get rid of Pluto?"
I think that the orbit-clearing requirement is pretty good, even though the Earth still has a little work to do in that department.
> On the other hand, I do not like the fact that a planet should orbit to > Sun to be called a planet. On this point, I preferred the original > proposal in orbit around a star. I don't see why our solar system > should be any different, why planet-like celestial bodies orbitting > other stars are not called planets.
Because they're only defining what a Solar planet is, not the general meaning of the word "planet":
The IAU therefore resolves that planets
and other bodies in our Solar System be
defined into three distinct categories
in the following way...
So the new definition doesn't apply to extrasolar planets. Why didn't they broaden their scope? Maybe the whole point of the exercise was just to deal "once and for all" with the Pluto problem. It's not going to affect the current work of people looking for extrasolar planets.
The language previously known as MSIL is now called CIL, Common Intermediate Language, and the idea is that other (non-Micro$oft) platforms can run.NET Framework stuff.
So far, I haven't had the experience that C# and.NET is anything other than a MS-specific skill. But one always hopes for... heh... interoperability and portability.
Pac-Man is a metaphor. The Pac-Man, see, he's a thief. He's going around a warehouse stealing things. Things worth ten points each. The ghosts, see, they're the cops. They're trying to catch Pac-Man, and if they catch him three times, he goes to the joint for life, game over, man. So what does Pac-Man do? He kills the cops. The game REWARDS you for killing cops. That's just sick, man. 64% is way off the mark.
Oh, I LOVE System Administrator Day! First, I make my way through a bouquet of brightly-colored balloons to my desk, where there's a pot of orchids waiting for me. I open the card and I'm pleasantly surprised to find FOUR Tigers tickets; it was only two last year.
At lunch, they take me to the best place in town. "On us," they say. "Have the prime rib, and don't worry about having a couple glasses of wine. Gina in Human Resources is handling the server today." When we get back to the office, there's a mariachi band and talk of a stripper. "Nothing's getting done today!" exclaims the boss as he whips out a beer-stained toga.
After the cake, it's all, "Hey, Chysn, why don't you cut out early today? And leave your pager with Gina."
It is much easier to control a populace which is fat, dumb and happy. They got the first two down, now they just need to figure out the happy part and their job is complete.
Fat, dumb and happy is okay; but fat, dumb and afraid works, too.
>...range is a weird adaptation to living in an overpopulated city > where your next meal is at close range, don't you think?
That's a good point. I'd guess this happened because greater human populations forced mosquito breeding grounds further to the outskirts of the city, where standing water and grass is perhaps more common.
As unfortunate as that trend is, it seems to go along with another possibly related thing: folks are putting more and more personal information on their networking sites and blogs, things that they'd be embarassed to tell a "real" friend and downright insane to tell an employer. Off the internet you might not have many CLOSE friends, but on the internet everyone is your BEST friend.
> I don't really see the motivation on MS's part there...
When reading their response (the parts about "NA", "NA", "NA" and "NA" come to mind), I was wondering why they weren't being MORE cooperative.
The Commonwealth has apparently already decided that they need to work with ODF to some extent, and they've apparently spent a ton of money on Microsoft products. Microsoft should be saying, "Thanks for continuing to use our products. Here's EXACTLY how to make the conversion."
In other words, Microsoft should be motivated to make a decent response by... by money.
You know what the REAL problem with telecommuting is? It's kids. There you are, sitting at home, trying to set apart work from nonwork, but the kids know you're in the house. They want to play, and they're just so cute and irrisistible.
But TFA didn't say that they were going to require FREE broadband access; counties are commiting to creating or enhancing the infrastructure to support broadband. In the US, penetration is an issue, but lack of competition is an increasingly large complaint. I don't see how the EU's system is going to avoid that very same problem. It might even be worse in places where there's only one provider: instead of being inexpensive, the price of broadband may be off the charts for rural residents.
> Which is a pitty because I'd like to know how much more advanced the > human race would be right now if it weren't towing along this massive > collective social fraud that it's hobbled itself with for the last > x-thousand years.
That's like looking at a baby and saying, "Stupid baby, why don't you know calculus, and why do you insist on drinking out of that boob?" This "social fraud" is part of our race's infancy, and we'll eventually have to give it up, but the weaning process can't be circumvented or rushed.
On a side note, I've always been surprised that the Christian Right goes after Harry Potter but not Star Trek. In the Star Trek universe, religion is something that humankind has outgrown, along with crime, war, poverty, and disease.
If we just stay alive for a while, we'll get there.
With multiple, isolated, colonies a single thing won't wipe out ALL the humans.
Oh, except for the expansion of the universe and proton decay. Those things will get everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
> Taken literally that statement is true. You can certainly write a script to use a word processing
> software and a calculator application to levitate your house (this goal is one instance of the set
> "any imaginable purpose"), for instance. Most likely, that won't work.
If you had hardware controlled by the computer that was capable of levitating your house, then there's no reason it wouldn't work perfectly.
> But if we bring the scope down to "for solving emergent problems that the applications cannot
> solve in isolation", then how is this any different than writing a script to control gimp and
> oowriter on Linux?
> Unique... hmm, by your capsule description, it sounds just like Applescript
Yes, these are very both similar to how AREXX worked. In the case of AREXX, the applications actively extended the language with new functions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx
I had an Amiga 1200 when I was in college, the early 90s. One of the sweet things that the Amiga OS had was AREXX. It was a simple scripting language, but it was able to listen to and talk to applications that had an AREXX port. So you could write scripts that allowed entirely different applications to communicate with each other for any imaginable purpose. That was fun and--even by today's standards--unique.
Yes, "plaintiff" makes the tag cloud more often than "security."
> While Clinton did obviously commit perjury, I personally am happy he wasn't impeached for it since > it didn't really harm the country in any way. Dude, he was totally impeached for it.
I've still got a Tandy PC-1 pocket computer from the early 1980s. It was built by Sharp and re-badged for Radio Shack. It's got an extremely slow processor and less than 1.5 kilobytes of RAM for BASIC programs.
It was made in Japan and you can tell that it was built to last for decades. The chassis is sturdy metal with almost no flex to it and the keys are of very high quality. By today's technological standards the thing's a joke. But I bet it outlives my HP Pocket PC.
> Thats the biggest problem with our society, no one values experience, no one values wisdom
> gleaned from 25 years of doing the JOB. . . We don't do cutting edge, we do what works
I'm a "relatively older" programmer, too, and I think that statement is objectively false. Employers value experience and results above education, and I think that's why I'm gainfully employed as a PHP programmer despite the fact that I've spent only two of my 20 years of programming writing PHP.
But you can't--can't--can't--go into an interview and say, "I was writing COBOL before you could write your name, whipper snapper. Why, backinmyday...".
You don't have to dress like a 26-year-old. You don't have to dye your hair. You don't have to pretend to be anything you're not. But keep up with your industry. Learn Ruby, learn AJAX, contantly be a neophyte in something. The constant change has ALWAYS been what makes IT a great industry to be in. If you don't do "cutting edge," it means you've given up, and THAT'S why there's no interest.
> And a definition like 'cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit'
> which has nothing to do with the properties of the planet itself, and
> is obviously a post hoc definition contrived to eliminate Pluto, is how
> science should work?
The ability of a body to have cleared its orbit has all KINDS of things to do with the properties of the body itself. How massive is it? What's its diameter? How long has it been orbiting the sun?
I agree with you when you say that the definition is designed to exclude Pluto and others. But I don't see any malice; they're answering the question, "Why isn't Pluto a planet?" rather than the question, "What can we do to get rid of Pluto?"
I think that the orbit-clearing requirement is pretty good, even though the Earth still has a little work to do in that department.
If you read the Resolution, they're only defining objects in the Solar system. They're not giving a broad definition of the word "planet."
> anyway, i was hoping that they decided to give just one exemption to
> pluto to be part of the planet and all others will no longer be
> planets.
Definitional irregularity for the sake of a young (76-year-old) tradition isn't my idea of how science should work.
> On the other hand, I do not like the fact that a planet should orbit to
> Sun to be called a planet. On this point, I preferred the original
> proposal in orbit around a star. I don't see why our solar system
> should be any different, why planet-like celestial bodies orbitting
> other stars are not called planets.
Because they're only defining what a Solar planet is, not the general meaning of the word "planet":
The IAU therefore resolves that planets
and other bodies in our Solar System be
defined into three distinct categories
in the following way...
So the new definition doesn't apply to extrasolar planets. Why didn't they broaden their scope? Maybe the whole point of the exercise was just to deal "once and for all" with the Pluto problem. It's not going to affect the current work of people looking for extrasolar planets.
it was gettin' too crowded out there, anyway.
I've had it with these motherfuckin' trolls on this motherfuckin' MySQL thread!
The language previously known as MSIL is now called CIL, Common Intermediate Language, and the idea is that other (non-Micro$oft) platforms can run .NET Framework stuff.
.NET is anything other than a MS-specific skill. But one always hopes for... heh... interoperability and portability.
So far, I haven't had the experience that C# and
Pac-Man is a metaphor. The Pac-Man, see, he's a thief. He's going around a warehouse stealing things. Things worth ten points each. The ghosts, see, they're the cops. They're trying to catch Pac-Man, and if they catch him three times, he goes to the joint for life, game over, man. So what does Pac-Man do? He kills the cops. The game REWARDS you for killing cops. That's just sick, man. 64% is way off the mark.
Oh, I LOVE System Administrator Day! First, I make my way through a bouquet of brightly-colored balloons to my desk, where there's a pot of orchids waiting for me. I open the card and I'm pleasantly surprised to find FOUR Tigers tickets; it was only two last year.
At lunch, they take me to the best place in town. "On us," they say. "Have the prime rib, and don't worry about having a couple glasses of wine. Gina in Human Resources is handling the server today." When we get back to the office, there's a mariachi band and talk of a stripper. "Nothing's getting done today!" exclaims the boss as he whips out a beer-stained toga.
After the cake, it's all, "Hey, Chysn, why don't you cut out early today? And leave your pager with Gina."
Some of us have been doing this for YEARS. At least now we have a buzzword for it.
Maybe this is just me living in a liberal echo chamber, but I didn't think Ken Lay was "controversial." I assumed he was universally despised.
Fat, dumb and happy is okay; but fat, dumb and afraid works, too.
Nobody can accuse us of not being in an echo chamber!
An echo chamber!
An echo chamber!
> ...range is a weird adaptation to living in an overpopulated city
> where your next meal is at close range, don't you think?
That's a good point. I'd guess this happened because greater human populations forced mosquito breeding grounds further to the outskirts of the city, where standing water and grass is perhaps more common.
So, the mosquitoes had to learn to commute.
As unfortunate as that trend is, it seems to go along with another possibly related thing: folks are putting more and more personal information on their networking sites and blogs, things that they'd be embarassed to tell a "real" friend and downright insane to tell an employer. Off the internet you might not have many CLOSE friends, but on the internet everyone is your BEST friend.
> I don't really see the motivation on MS's part there...
When reading their response (the parts about "NA", "NA", "NA" and "NA" come to mind), I was wondering why they weren't being MORE cooperative.
The Commonwealth has apparently already decided that they need to work with ODF to some extent, and they've apparently spent a ton of money on Microsoft products. Microsoft should be saying, "Thanks for continuing to use our products. Here's EXACTLY how to make the conversion."
In other words, Microsoft should be motivated to make a decent response by... by money.
You know what the REAL problem with telecommuting is? It's kids. There you are, sitting at home, trying to set apart work from nonwork, but the kids know you're in the house. They want to play, and they're just so cute and irrisistible.
But TFA didn't say that they were going to require FREE broadband access; counties are commiting to creating or enhancing the infrastructure to support broadband. In the US, penetration is an issue, but lack of competition is an increasingly large complaint. I don't see how the EU's system is going to avoid that very same problem. It might even be worse in places where there's only one provider: instead of being inexpensive, the price of broadband may be off the charts for rural residents.
> Which is a pitty because I'd like to know how much more advanced the
> human race would be right now if it weren't towing along this massive
> collective social fraud that it's hobbled itself with for the last
> x-thousand years.
That's like looking at a baby and saying, "Stupid baby, why don't you know calculus, and why do you insist on drinking out of that boob?" This "social fraud" is part of our race's infancy, and we'll eventually have to give it up, but the weaning process can't be circumvented or rushed.
On a side note, I've always been surprised that the Christian Right goes after Harry Potter but not Star Trek. In the Star Trek universe, religion is something that humankind has outgrown, along with crime, war, poverty, and disease.
If we just stay alive for a while, we'll get there.
With multiple, isolated, colonies a single thing won't wipe out ALL the humans. Oh, except for the expansion of the universe and proton decay. Those things will get everyone.